Personal Growth

I have seen the future! My future, and it’s glorious.  Better than I had ever thought possible, truly.  And I will, as my favorite starship captain always says, “make it so.”

Sale vs License of Digital Information

Amazon’s “Buy” now with 1-click

I’ve been thinking about this issue ever since I first heard about Amazon remotely pulling already paid for copies of 1984 e-books from user’s Kindles.  The issue resurfaced when Amazon remotely deleted another lady’s entire collection of paid for books.

Fitness and Motivation

I need to remember how big an impact keeping up some kind of fitness routine has on my mental health.

I’m working on the hundredpushups.com program as part of my Nerdfitness 6-week challenge.  That will end on September 17th, hopefully with a significant improvement in my push-up abilities as well as my motivation and energy levels.

Linux Desktops (2012 2nd Quarter Comparison)

Relatively little has changed in the Linux Desktop world since my last post in March.  As such this will be a relatively quick post.

I’d say the biggest news would be the targeting of Gnome 3 Fallback mode for primary use by a couple distributions.  Trisquel, one of the FSF’s approved distributions as well as Solus OS have decided to go this way, disregarding the Gnome team’s UI redesign, and instead opting to enable the “fallback mode” to be a more usable, less crippled environment.

Wedding Stuff

There’s so much wedding stuff to do!  Since Miu and I decided on having a wedding I’ve learned about a lot of it.  Just like in America, the wedding industry in Japan is huge!

Costs for ceremonies range from 5000 to 50000 dollars easily, and as I’m sure anyone who has looked into whats possible with weddings knows, the sky is the limit.

So far as I can tell we’re planning a ceremony something along the following lines:

Quick Review of Fedora 17: Beefy Miracle

I just downloaded and ran the LiveCD of Beefy Miracle, Fedora’s most recent release.

Likes:

1. Japanese input methods and fonts come preinstalled.
2. Accessibility features available.
3. Generally polished interface
4. Feels mature finally.

Dislikes:

1. Stuck with fallback mode on unsupported video cards
2. Touch screen design for use on non-touch devices is stupid.
3. Lack of configuration options, right clicking on the wallpaper and panels does nothing.  There’s no way to change the default window manager theme which is over-sized and made for fingers not cursors.

Revision

I’ve started revising my first Nanowrimo book.  I expect it to be a long process, but I think there’s some worthwhile stuff there that I really want to unlock.

The more I write the more I look back on what I’ve written.  I feel a bit as though it’s time to stop writing new stuff and time to spend more energy on polishing and revising.  Not because I don’t want to write new stuff, but because I think in the process of revision I’m going to learn as much about writing as I did when I wrote my first two Nanowrimo novels.  Once I have revised them I can apply the nuggets of wisdom I unearth to my other projects.

Relax Mark…

Lately I’ve been telling myself to take it easy.  I get worked up over things far to easily sometimes.  I don’t know how evident that is to those around me, but I’m less worried about that than I am my own mental health.

I liked the rain

Saturday I went for a walk in the rain.

I wore a pair of fast drying shorts, a comfortable t-shirt, a hoodie, a rain jacket, and my new sneakers.  I had a big umbrella and a baseball cap to shield my glasses from spray.

Linux Desktops (2012 1st Quarter Comparison)

A lot has changed since my last post about Linux desktops only a few months ago.  Mostly in response to the big uproar in the community over Gnome3 and Unity.